Hotel-Dieu Grace Healthcare is joining the push to eliminate single-use plastics.
The organization will start with plastic water bottles and over the course of the summer will roll out several other initiatives in an effort to go green.
This from President and CEO Janice Kaffer who says, with 1,100 employees spread across a 33-acre campus, cutting plastic is going to be a slow process, but one she's confident they can achieve.
"We're a fairly broad campus. So we have high energy and utility costs and we have a fair bit of opportunities to be able to improve that. What can we use instead of plastic? There's lots of little things that we will start doing over the summer and start to build an education campaign on that."
She says several efforts are already underway.
"On a more grass roots level, we're starting to get involved in a composting program. So minimizing our food waste, but one of the big initiatives is we're going to be eliminating plastic water bottles from our hospital. We, last year, installed water dispensers across the campus in order to set the stage for this."
Hotel Dieu Grace Healthcare CEO Janice Kaffer (by AM800's Peter Langille)
Kaffer says it's all about education.
"In many ways, as an organization, we haven't really fully embraced this the way we should. To me, my grandkids are the ones who are coming home from school with all this information about what we should be doing and they're educating them in the schools, so why shouldn't we as a hospital? So our green committee has been doing quite a bit of work on educating our staff across the campus."
Earlier this month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a pledge that the federal government would ban single-use plastics by 2021.
Several local organizations, including both the public and Catholic school boards, have began the elimination of plastics as well.